From the archive: Just Tell Them, A conversation with Zach Groshell

Explaining things well is both art and science, the educator writes in a new book

Hey there, Bell Ringers! Hope you are getting some summer rest and relaxation. Today’s letter is one from the archives—a long-form, in-depth conversation with a top educator in the growing science of learning field. Instructional coach, author and podcaster Zach Groshell’s new book from last year, Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching, is about how teachers can use explanation to improve student learning. Check it out below.

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If I had to boil down all the education reporting I’ve done in the last decade into just one phrase—I’m imagining something like Michael Pollan’s famous “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”—mine would be, “Teaching matters.” 

Teaching matters. Does it sound obvious? Not to me. So much of how the public views education is tangled up in all these other things—how public schools are run, flavor-of-the-day fights over curriculum and how to spend the budget, and of course the thousands of things over which educators have little control—that maybe we forget how special it is, our species’ ability to show kids how to read, how to do math, how to write well and become a knowledgeable and compassionate citizen. How teachers teach, and what they teach, makes an enormous difference in the life of a child. 

Many parents I talk with are often concerned about all the other stuff at school: the environment, the extra-curriculars and the philosophy—whether it’s a STEM school, Montessori-based, etc. I think a lot of families are also concerned about the safety of their schools, for obvious and incredibly depressing reasons. These are all important. 

But what happens between teacher and students all day, and how that accumulates over time—that matters. 

I had a recent, early-morning, nearly pre-coffee conversation about teaching with former elementary school teacher Zach Groshell. Groshell, now an instructional coach and education consultant, hosts the Progressively Incorrect podcast, and has been interviewed before here at The Bell Ringer. And he’s written a new book, out November 26, called Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching. 

Groshell’s ideas on explanations, all supported by research, get at the very heart of teaching—how to give information to students, and how to make sure they got it. He describes the book as “short and snappy” and “straight to the point,” with the goal being to use the best research available to just tell teachers how to do explicit teaching well—because educators, like kids, don’t have a lot of time to waste.   

One thing Groshell said months ago on X (formerly Twitter) still lives in my head: It's near impossible to complete advanced coursework without foundational skills in place. These prerequisites require more practice and reinforcement than we often estimate. So, we move under-practiced kids on to the next level, where they are made to feel like failures.

For a lot of kids, that means a lot more “teacher talk” than they’re probably currently getting—something that many teachers are either persuaded or taught not to do. Teachers often get the idea, Groshell said, that explaining things to kids will harm their development or curiosity. He used to think that, too—he used to be the teacher with posterboard all over the floor and projects spilling out into the hallway. (More on that below.) But later, he began to understand what real learning actually looks like. And often—not always—it means much more teacher talk than he was used to. 

Hoping you’ll join me in the comments for some conversation about this important topic. Now on to the interview:

The Bell Ringer:  What was the impetus to write the book? What were you seeing in  classrooms that made you think that teachers and maybe principals, maybe even parents, need this book?

Zach Groshell: The main thing is the importance of talking about guidance, and developing a type of teaching that really goes away from what a lot of us learned in teacher school. Which was that the cooler, groovier version of teaching—something that's more exciting for classrooms—means you try your best to use explanation as a last resort. 

As an instructional coach, I would walk around classrooms and I'd see the teacher, and they'd be looking at me as they're doing a math lesson. I'd walk up to them and say, 

Yeah, it might be about time to explain it to them. 

And the teachers would look at me and say, Really, now? Now? 

I’d say, Yeah, yeah, just tell them. 

And that's where [the idea for the book] comes from. It doesn't come from the idea that you should only tell them stuff. We know a lot about active learning in terms of retrieval practice and spaced practice. But the whole idea of withholding information and trying to get kids to struggle, I just don't buy it. And the worked example effect, I think, pretty much dispels that idea. 

The Bell Ringer: You talk in the book a lot about modeling and the worked example effect. How do you define those terms, so we are all on the same page? 

Zach Groshell: Modeling is just a single component of a whole teaching system, regardless of whether you decide to call that explicit instruction or just instruction. I thought it was important to talk about it as a whole book, because it's one of the most important things we as teachers can do. The worked example effect is basically when the student receives a fully worked out problem with its solution. [There’s research behind it.] 

A lot of people may even know about the worked example effect. They might think I do worked examples, or I do explain, but they're giving partial examples without the solution, or they're not giving the kids the answers. They may think they are modeling, but they're essentially giving a partial model. 

The Bell Ringer: So in math—why is showing them the answer part of the worked example? Why is that so effective?

Zach Groshell: There are lots of different theories. One is that it's basically giving the child an expert schema. An expert knows, step by step, how to do something and how all the steps are connected, and they only work in a certain way that's the most efficient way. They don't go off on some other path. And so when the expert provides that information, it gives the student a chance to inquire into the expert's schema.

Essentially, the student has to do mental work to connect what the expert knows and what they themselves currently don't know. So it's much more effective to do that somewhere along the way. I prefer to do it at the beginning, than to leave it to the last five minutes of class and sloppily do it as they're running out, or to never do it as some people have been told to do. 

The Bell Ringer: Where did teacher prep programs get the idea to tell teachers to do things this way? To *not* explain? In the book, right up top, you talked about your teacher training and how the people who were teaching you seemed to de-emphasize the teachers’ role in helping the kids learn stuff. So tell me a little bit about your training. Are teachers being trained in the same way today?

Zach Groshell:  In my entire university program, I had a single teacher who fell on the side of explicit and Direct Instruction, actually specifically capital-D capital-I. That teacher, her name is Marcy Stein, she’s a colleague and a mentor of mine. She was on sabbatical the year I was doing my [classroom training] program. Every other teacher I had fell on the side of progressive, romantic education, where the most important thing you can do for students is to sort of activate them as learners and try to create self-directed learning activities. 

I had a teacher who tried to teach us genetics through cookies. We'd go home, bake a bunch of cookies, come back with the cookies. Then we would look at each other's cookies and realize that they all kind of looked a little bit different, even though we used the same ingredients. And that was supposed to be a metaphor for how you share genes from your mom and dad, but that everyone turns out looking different. Even now I have a hard time remembering what the point of it was. But imagine that everyone's just eating tons of cookies, and that was basically every single encouraging message I had from my entire program: do things that are fun, get the kids to lead the learning. Old learning is old-fashioned.

By the end of the program, it started to get into the realm of like, you know, this is a social justice issue—these kids deserve this kind of teaching, and you're essentially a bad person for even doubting that this methodology won't work.

The Bell Ringer: When was this, when you were in university? 

Zach Groshell: 2011.

The Bell Ringer: Are you getting the feeling when you are working with teachers now that it is much the same? Or has anything changed? [I’m thinking about how the science of reading movement may have changed how elementary teachers are told to teach reading, for example.]

Zach Groshell: I hear mixed things. The first thing is to note that I've worked with some schools that do not require teaching certificates, and these folks come to my presentations on explicit instruction and they're very confused—they say, but you're just describing teaching! Why are you describing teaching in a way to make it sound like you're what you're saying is controversial, because what you're saying is common sense, right? 

But the folks that go to the traditional training programs all understand this. They all will say, I tried it out, so hard. I tried everything that ended with the word -based, you know, inquiry-based, or project-based. And many say they either had to super-structure the project to the point that it’s almost not even a project, or they say, I tried it, it failed, and I just chalked it up to I was building their brain muscles up, and there was something that was off about it.

The Bell Ringer: What I was thinking all throughout your book is that telling teachers they shouldn’t explain things, it's de-empathizing their own importance in a classroom full of children who don't know a lot of stuff.

Zach Groshell: When students don't know something, I think the kindest, most empathetic thing you can do is show them the next thing that they need to know and be able to do. For a lot of kids, this is about individual differences, kids who perhaps have a weaker working memory, or have some sort of attention deficit. Or kids who just regularly struggle to control their learning and their cognition—they are the kids that I've had the most success with as an interventionist. 

The reason why is because I'm going to regulate the flow of information. I'm going to create an environment where step-by-step, students are never going to have to multitask. They’re going to know what's expected of them. 

A lot of times we design learning—like we saw with the whole language experiment—we design learning for the kids who already know how to do it, or already have the resources from home, and it essentially further disadvantages the other kids. We create that Matthew effect, where the kids who already have a lot of advantages are given even further advantage through the instructional design.

The Bell Ringer: You said in the book that when you first started teaching, you resisted explaining things. What did you do instead? What are the things you tried, and what happened? Did you make this connection early on where you said, “Hmmmm, not explaining things doesn’t work very well.”? 

Zach Groshell: I tried doing this for a good five years. I was really praised for it at my school, because my classroom door was always open with projects that were sticking out. The whole front of the foyer outside my classroom would be covered in these really dramatic displays for the parents, tables covered in projects. We’d be reading The Life of Pi and we're all doing a boat race, or some big scheme where everybody needs to think, so we’d put a bunch of posters on the ground, have kids use their markers. Everything was sort of meant to thrill them. 

What occurred was—I always say this when it comes to books like Building Thinking Classrooms—look at who's holding the marker. Who's the kid actually doing the work? If you focus in on them you notice that they are thinking aloud, they're kind of self-explaining and doing all the things we want all the students to do. Everyone else is laying low or copying them or humoring the teacher, or worse. Why are you guys not working? Why aren't you trying? Why aren't you helping out? The answer is that they can't. The answer is that they do not know enough to be able to do it. 

And so I would stop these schemes all the time and reprimand everyone: Guys, I need you to be better. I need you to be better than this. 

The Bell Ringer: One of my kids—he’s the one not holding the marker and trying to fly under the radar! I’ve seen the difference in how much he's able to learn when he has a teacher that explains things. He does so much better. 

Zach Groshell: In Craig Barton's How I Wish I'd Taught Math, I remember reading one part where he talked about being the silent teacher. He said, “I'm just going to work the problem, and everyone needs to look at me in silence, and I'm not even going to say anything. I'm just going to work the problem. That way, they can focus on what's on the screen and and how I do it, step by step.”

And I thought, Well, there's like a million and one ways to explain, isn't there? You can do it in a way that overloads them. You can do it in a way that gives them a lot of extraneous information, or you can be that really slick teacher who could make anything feel easy, you know? And I think that that's one of the parts, maybe five years into my career, where I thought, I need to change some things.

The Bell Ringer: What is the research that anchors this idea that clear, direct explanations are more effective?

Zach Groshell: There are three main areas that I draw upon. The first is the database of cognitive science research. The most important one would be the worked example effect, but also sort of its opposite, which is retrieval practice. Basically, when I work a problem, I'm pushing something into the mind: encoding information. And then, when I ask you questions about it, I'm asking you to pull it out. And if I do that in a spaced way—we're talking about successive relearning, or, you know, successive retrieval practice—that forms the backbone of the research. 

There is also feedback, and then the next area is looking at research around the most effective teachers. The best information on this, because it’s free and very straightforward, I believe is Rosenshine’s Principles, which is Barak Rosenshine’s research on what the most successful teachers do in terms of their moves—the ones that most correlate with student achievement and gains in their classrooms. These are teachers that tend to model and give worked examples, but also ask questions and slowly fade their guidance to have the students be able to do it independently—basically an explicit teaching model.

And then the third area that I think is a contribution to the world—because I'm so obsessed with capital-DI Direct Instruction, is Engelmann Direct Instruction. There's a sophisticated instructional theory underlying Direct Instruction, used in the successful Project Follow Through, which was the largest and most extensive research study in the history of education. 

I tried to incorporate all three areas to make a case that modeling should be early, often and really, really well-executed. 

The Bell Ringer: How do you define “explanation”? You make it clear in the book that it's not just another word for lecturing or talking. It’s a detailed process, and several different ways you can do it. According to research, what does a good explanation look like?

Zach Groshell: There's a difference between the typical meaning of the word explanation and an instructional explanation. What is an explanation that is actually going to be effective for learning—what's going to lead to learning gains? That's the focus of the book.

The first thing is that an effective instructional explanation is highly interactive. The teacher is never going to say more than a few sentences at a time, minimal statements is what I call them, before activating a student response or asking a student to re-voice what they just said, or checking for whether they're listening or not. The reason for that is, as we're explaining, the information is just coming from my mouth and going into your ears. It's essentially transient, and it's really hard to pin down what the teacher is saying. Students can start to lose their train of thought as they start thinking about the past thing the teacher said. It sort of slips through the mind really easily, because working memory is a very fragile beast. 

So what you need to do is pause your explanation at key points and elicit student responses at a frequent rate—a rate that I could say only a handful of teachers I've ever personally witnessed do as effectively as I think needs to be done. The other parts that go into the book relate to things that sort of complement or augment an explanation, like making sure that you have analogies and examples in your explanation, rather than simply speaking like you're an instruction manual. This is how to illuminate a little bit more, show them what it is. One of those ways is using visuals. With a visual, you can show them what you’re talking about. Maybe you don't even need to explain it. You just need to show it and then explain what you're showing. 

Explanation does have a time and a place, and that place is front-loaded and then faded away, because eventually students don't need to rely on explanations if they have it internalized. When teaching is successful, then students can do it by themselves. The problem is we often try to explain something once, go give kids a big assignment where they're meant to use that explanation, and then the kids can't do it. Why is that? Because there wasn't a process of guidance fading, where basically the next step after a fully worked example is to give kids partial examples. Then start going into the world of prompts and hints. Finally, at the end, all you need to do is circulate and give feedback as the kids are working entirely independently. 

The Bell Ringer: Does this work equally well for all subjects? It works equally well in both math and history?

Zach Groshell: Absolutely. But there are subject-specific examples. As you're reading [the book], you're going to get a general overview of the importance of explanation. But then you, as the subject expert, have to take these ideas, look at your curriculum and fit, and because there's 1,000,001 explanations you're going to do in a course of 180 days, those are going to be specific to your scope and sequence. You have to develop those with your team and with your department for your subject.

Some are less applicable than others. Visuals, clearly, are very useful, using diagrams which might be closer to science; where storytelling—which I go into in one chapter—storytelling may more be applicable to history, where you're kind of telling the entire events of history as a narrative.

The Bell Ringer:  What’s an example of a good explanation that’s also interactive?

Zach Groshell: I like to categorize interaction into checking for listening and checking for understanding. What the teacher needs to do is see the people in front of him, and that's really hard for new teachers. You're thinking about what you're going to say and how you're going to say it. You're thinking about the assignment and whether that's going to land or going to flop. But once you really get through a bit of your first early years and you're more confident in the classroom, you need to start thinking about all 30 kids in your classroom. And that's what expert teachers do, they scan and look and notice. But you can never know what’s going on in students’ heads unless you have them externalize it. And if you just keep talking and you think they know what you're talking about without asking them, you’ll typically try to move forward too quickly, right? Just plowing ahead without stopping, adjusting and dealing with misconceptions. 

You also want the kids themselves to start to solve problems in advance of giving them problems. So if you ask them questions, get them retrieving and using problem-solving as early as possible. It's for an assessment purpose, but also it's for problem-solving purposes. When they go and start solving the problems, they've already had practice with them.

Here are some examples: in the book I talk about choral response—it gets everybody to hear one word or small chains of words, so you can check if they're paying attention. You can use mini-whiteboards so you can see and scan an entire class. Are they getting it? You can use “turn and talks” while the teacher circulates and listens in for more elaborative answers. Also, using non-volunteer cold calling that takes a sample of everyone in the classroom. 

So warming them up with a turn and talk, perhaps, and then quickly calling around the room and getting everyone to share. This way the teacher is basically segmenting their lecture into smaller steps, then after checking that each step is being followed, take an opportunity to see if the kids are paid attention or listening, and if they're not listening and they're not getting it, they're not following along, then you've got to re-teach. Or you've got to encourage motivation, or use your behavior management skills to get everyone actually focusing. Interaction serves so many purposes for the teacher. Also, long-winded lectures are simply boring and very hard to process! 

The Bell Ringer: What are teachers’ reactions when you talk to them about all these different ways to explain and interact?

Zach Groshell: I use a lot of video with teachers. Teach Like a Champion videos, which are awesome. And I work for a place called StepLab, which has basically a video for every step you could ever do. But I'll show teachers videos of this high expectation of what a really rigorous, explicit teaching lesson looks like. And they're often shocked at the level of rigor in these classrooms. After presenting, I've had teachers that have come up to me at the coffee break and say, “Honestly, I feel like a failure. That was amazing.” 

And they’re seeing this distant hope of this really amazing teacher on screen, and then comparing it to themselves and realizing that there are so many things to work on. That's what I like to start off with. They may already think that they're doing some of these things, but it's the precision and the execution, and the fact you can get 30 responses to happen in one second, or that you can explain something and get everyone to have 100% success rate on their assignment, that's that's what we're always working for. I think as teachers, career long, that's what you're pretty much working on.

The Bell Ringer: Thinking of those Teach Like a Champion videos, I've been spending time in a lot of charter schools, and there is a different rhythm. You know what I mean? They are packing so much in.

Zach Groshell: I call it “teaching their butts off.” There is a much different, faster rhythm, and kids get used to it. They know what the routine is going to be. I do think that teaching in general needs to be much more fast-paced, and that teachers need to see their role as being almost like an athlete. Get up there and really stand and deliver for these kids because they don't have another moment to waste. 

The Bell Ringer: How do students fare when they are given the kind of explanations that you're advocating for in the book? 

Zach Groshell: When teachers are playing “Guess What's In My Head,” and they've conceived of their role as—let's ask lots of sort of inquisitive-type, cool questions—and I'm going to kind of try to funnel you to the answer through asking you more questions. And then I keep saying yes or no to each of them, the student will finally get there. But just imagine trying that while you're playing a video game. You try this, it fails. You try this, that fails. Sure, some kids persist through it, and they say, sweet, I made it to the end. But other kids, they fail. They turn off the video game. 

But with “Guess What’s in My Head” questions, do the kids have something to draw upon? They'll start answering the questions, okay, and the teacher will take their lead. But if the teacher senses this isn't working, they will just tell them. I think it's just better to do that right off the bat. 

Give the kids, every single kid, an equitable shot at understanding the content by giving that information to them in a really clear and succinct way. And then you ask the questions. You start asking questions about it. You may even start asking questions like, what do you think about this? Evaluate it. Give your opinion of this. You can get them to critical thinking and evaluation and synthesis, the higher order thinking skills, so much faster if you give them something to think with if you end the “Guess What's In My Head” sequence and tell them what they need to know. Then ask them lots of questions about it.